• General Web Scraping

  Scraping prices and availability from travel booking websites

  Posted by Sunny Melanija on 12/18/2024 at 8:26 am

  Scraping prices and availability from travel booking websites is challenging due to their dynamic nature and frequent use of anti-scraping mechanisms. Most travel sites use JavaScript to render content like flight or hotel availability, requiring tools like Selenium or Puppeteer to scrape effectively. Another approach is to monitor network requests for API calls that fetch this data. If such endpoints are available, you can query them directly for faster and more reliable data collection. For static sections of the site, Python’s BeautifulSoup can still be used to extract information.
  Here’s an example using Puppeteer to scrape prices and availability:

  const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
  (async () => {
      const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true });
      const page = await browser.newPage();
      await page.goto('https://example.com/travel', { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
      const travelData = await page.evaluate(() => {
          return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.travel-item')).map(item => ({
              destination: item.querySelector('.destination-name')?.innerText.trim(),
              price: item.querySelector('.price-value')?.innerText.trim(),
              availability: item.querySelector('.availability-status')?.innerText.trim(),
          }));
      });
      console.log(travelData);
      await browser.close();
  })();
  

  For large-scale scraping, proxies and rate-limiting are essential to avoid being flagged. Scraping responsibly and respecting terms of service is also critical when dealing with travel booking sites. How do you handle frequently changing layouts on such websites?

  Sunny Melanija replied 4 days, 16 hours ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
• 0 Replies

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